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Irish Examiner
05-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Examiner
Book review: Memoir rich in literary allusion, social mobility, and so much more
It has become commonplace to laud English writer Geoff Dyer for his versatility, but that makes the praise no less valid. A multi-awarding author of numerous works of fiction, non-fiction, criticism, and other surprisingly genre-defying books, he has now turned his highly accomplished hand to memoir. Homework is an account of Dyer's upbringing in Cheltenham in the 1960s and '70s, a world he evokes in gloriously minute, Proustian detail. Dyer's 1960s working-class childhood is depicted as unapologetically ordinary, filled with the boyish toys and past times that arouse gentle nostalgia for the mid-20th-century world. He writes charmingly about his ever-growing collections of army figurines, Airfix models, Action Man dolls, and bubblegum cards, of playing conkers in the autumn, of the colours and tastes of long-gone sweets, and the rapture of receiving annuals at Christmas. Later, Dyer writes with understated wit and self-deprecation about his adolescent schooldays, detailing his clumsy efforts with girls, his love of football (undiminished by his own mediocrity at the sport), his bookishness, his embarrassing puberty, and his developing sense of physical inferiority. Surrounded by an array of grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, and friends, being an only child was never a cause for loneliness. A young Geoff Dyer in his bedroom in his family's home in Cheltenham, England. But, naturally, the two central people in his life — and in the book — are his parents. His portrayal of his reticent, Methodist-background mother Phyllis, whose birthmark tragically afflicted her entire sense of self, is tender and moving. Dyer's more complicated portrait of his father Arthur, a Labour-supporting, Thatcher-despising, staunchly anti-Royalist engineer, is of an unusually tight-fisted and tight-lipped man, who was also self-sacrificing and without any real meanness. He stresses that although they were not poor, his father's internalisation of the wartime rationing spirit simply meant he would never spend any money. Dyer presents distinct dead or diminishing worlds. There is his own vanishing world, the source of the memoir itself. There is the dying world of his parents' generation, and before them, his grandparents', whose farming lives were to the young writer an alien mixture of myth and the Victorian fiction of Thomas Hardy. Dyer's family history also acts as an account of social mobility in England over a century or so. His mother's father, a veteran of the Battle of the Somme, was an illiterate man from rural Shropshire, while much of Arthur Dyer's young life was shaped by the parsimony and violence of wartime experiences. Arthur is depicted increasingly at odds with the post-war consumer boom, constantly complaining about the cost of things, at one point even putting so little petrol in his beloved Vauxhall Victor that he has to coast down inclining roads. Even so, his father could not stop the forces of progress. In 1970, the family moved to a bigger home and, later, Dyer went to study in Oxford. Although Homework is not a book about Dyer's formation as a writer, it is a book rich in literary allusion. Yet, this literariness is never heavy-handed but lightly worn and always illuminating. Dyer is an immensely skilled writer, one who can seamlessly switch from joyfully endorsing his childhood love of sugar to considering, by way of Roland Barthes, the semiotics of an old family photograph. Like all the best memoirs, Homework also reflects on the process of recollection as well as offering a defence of it: 'Can't memory', he asks, 'be a species or form of fact?' The facts of his youth, as he recalls them here, are poignant, joyous, funny, sad and evocative, and offer a portrait of a life of reasonable contentment in post-war England that feels at once both fading and familiar.
New Statesman
25-06-2025
- Entertainment
- New Statesman
How not to plagiarise Geoff Dyer
I am close to a complete first draft of a book about England called Anglia, but stare with anxiety at the seemingly convincing and large pile of paper, knowing that lurking in the crisp, regular type is an unviable mix of quite funny jokes and some amazing drunkenly typed rubbish. In order to avoid facing this problem I keep writing more stuff to dilute the terrible stuff. I fear that, in actuality, I am maintaining about the same ratio. The basis for the project was that I could not write a book about Britain from the Middle Ages onwards, as I had for Germany and elsewhere in earlier books, because too much of the story is already well known and so often parodied. I also had to restrict the book to England, as I could only deal with Scotland, Wales and Ireland in such a cursory way as to be offensive. My heart sank at having to write about people like King John. But then I remembered a family story: my mother's grandmother was, as a little girl, present at the hanging of the 'Rugeley Poisoner' in Stafford in 1856. I realised I could start there and make a more detailed book that might have some unexpected information in it. Although flicking through the pile at the moment, an awful lot appears to be about Madame Blavatsky and her circle. County grounds I also thought as a basic writing discipline I should never refer to the royal family, elections or the empire, as these would take up too much space and would make me write filler guff. One further limit was that most of the book should clearly be rooted in specific counties, ideally with two stories from each county to spread the book countrywide, but chucking away some of the smaller bits and bobs (Rutland) to give their votes to London. In any event, with this series of Toytown-Ozymandian arbitrary decisions – an arbitrariness I now see as having deep and lasting roots in English history – I am sitting next to a pile of paper covered with words of variable quality wondering when my life took this wrong turn. Avoiding all Homework I happily had spent some three years writing and researching Anglia, inwardly smiling at some of its little bits of humour, when disaster struck. In May, Geoff Dyer published Homework, his memoir of growing up in England only about five years before I grew up in England. There is no writer I admire more and I felt suddenly that what had been my own rather special England-evoking project was now something like a trodden-on Thunderbird 5 toy facing off against a real-life Death Star. We even both grew up in spa towns and both (I assume) have access to very similar healing-waters jokes. Obviously I could not read Homework. I am drawn into the tractor beam of Dyer's prose style anyway and need to keep well away. And, worse, I saw a headline for a review of Homework that mentioned the word Airfix. I had planned to write about my Airfix model of the Nazi battleship Tirpitz, jokily saying how after hours of flailing effort with knife and glue to stick together my shambolic Tirpitz, it indeed now looked like the real thing, but in the aftermath of the RAF's legendary Operation Catechism. But what if Dyer had made the same joke and I was accused of plagiarism? In order to avoid reading his book I now had to cross out my Operation Catechism joke. The way we Wear Throughout researching Anglia there have been several points where I have found myself having to watch yet again Sunderland on Film, a DVD of documentary clips from the North East Film Archive that span from 1904 to Sunderland's 1973 FA Cup triumph over Leeds. Only an hour long, it has much of the impact of a great realist novel – the faces, clothes, gestures, hard work. The earliest films included as many people on the streets as possible, grinning and waving, as they would subsequently pay to see themselves projected on a screen. A wedding, a grand shop, a skittering horse-and-cart, two men waltzing, Great War commemorations, the Pyrex factory, an astounding scene of men blowing glass to make scientific instruments. The climax of 1973, with all shops shut and the streets empty for the final, had one shop sign stating: 'As a mark of sympathy towards Messrs Bremner, Giles & Company, this shop will be closed at 2pm on Saturday, May 5th.' The editing of the film is sort of a miracle, with shots of the game entangled with crowds watching televisions in shop windows, on a cinema screen, in someone's home, with close-ups of faces distorted and crying with tension. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe It is probably good that we are largely sheltered from watching such material – it is simply too nihilistic, too raw, too long ago, and the viewer has to sit there knowing that much of what made Sunderland great was about to be swept away. [See also: Is Thomas Skinner the future of the right?] Related
The Guardian
25-02-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Dear Nasa, please send me to Mars! The photographer who showed Britain – and space
The Quarry Hill flats in Leeds were once the largest social housing complex in the UK. A utopian vision of homes for 3,000 people. Built in the 1930s, they were modelled on the Karl-Marx-Hof in Vienna and La Cité de la Muette in Paris. However, after just 40 years, the buildings were crumbling and largely deserted. Over the course of five years in the 1970s, Peter Mitchell documented their demolition, from smashed windows and wrecked apartments to abandoned wardrobes and solitary shoes. Finally, when all that was left standing was a lone arch, he tried to photograph the wrecking crew standing in front of it, but couldn't get the arch in. 'So,' Mitchell remembers, 'the foreman said, 'We do have a crane.' I can't stand heights but they lowered the crane down so I could stand on it, then lifted me up to quickly get the shot. I was swaying about a bit and all but one of them came out blurred – but I got the picture.' Mitchell laughs gently at the memory. Now 82, he is one of the 20th century's most important early colour photographers and social historians. He has been called 'a narrator of how we were, a chaser of a disappearing world'. Yet he insists he just photographs 'things that take my eye. Sometimes, I'd see something and think, 'I'll come back when it's not raining.' Then I'd go back and it had been knocked down.' We're talking ahead of his new London exhibition Nothing Lasts Forever, which he thinks will be his last, but we meet in the ornate tiled cafe of Leeds Art Gallery, which hosted the exhibition last year and first showed his photos in 1975, when it was the City Art Gallery. He remembers that the new curator Sheila Ross wasn't hugely impressed by his silkscreen prints. 'But then she said, 'I like your photos.'' Mitchell's work exudes warmth and empathy. Although he's known for shots of what he calls 'dying buildings', some of his most powerful images capture people in the workplace and the dignity of their labour. From the early 1970s to the 2010s, he photographed fairground showman Francis Gavan alongside his gradually more weatherbeaten ghost train ride, which thrilled/terrified generations of schoolchildren (including myself) on Woodhouse Moor, then Pottery Fields – before suddenly both were gone. 'He built it himself and was proud of it,' Mitchell remembers. 'I think eventually the authorities deemed it unsafe.' After Gavan died, his family came to see Mitchell's photos, and the ghost train's giant skull is now in his cellar. 'Which would be quite a shock for anyone going down there.' Mitchell has always been fascinated by 'the glory of the wreckage'. Born in Eccles, near Manchester, he was relocated to Catford in London during the second world war and fondly remembers playing in air-raid shelters and bombed-out buildings. In his teens he held on to childhood things most people leave behind – toys, Airfix model kits, diaries – and he still has them to this day. After leaving school at 16, he trained as a cartographic draughtsman for the civil service but felt unfulfilled, so eight years later enrolled to study typography and graphic design at Hornsey College of Art, where a visiting Italian photographer inspired him to pick up a camera. 'But I had always believed,' he says, 'a photograph could be as powerful as a painting.' Mitchell came to Leeds in 1972 to visit a friend, fell in love with the Victorian architecture and never left, renting a place in Chapeltown for £2.50 a week and working as a van driver while he became established. On his first day in the city he visited Beckett Street cemetery. 'There were lots of gravestones for babies who'd died from cholera,' he says. 'I did a lot of photography that first day.' He made a major impact with his groundbreaking 1979 exhibition A New Refutation of the Space Viking 4 Mission – the first colour exhibition by a British photographer in a British gallery, namely Impressions in York. It was inspired by the 1976 Viking probes to Mars, although Mitchell gave it a twist, imagining that an alien craft had landed on Earth, in Leeds to be precise, and begun to take photos. 'I knew a student who'd written to Nasa asking what qualities you needed to become a spaceman and received a reply,' he explains. 'So I wrote to Nasa myself and received a humorous letter. 'Dear Mr Mitchell. We understand you want to go to Mars. If you give us a couple of million, we can get you up there. But if you just want a picture, we can send you one for nothing.'' They sent him more than one, in fact, and Mitchell enlarged these Martian landscapes and exhibited them alongside his own images of decaying Leeds, adorned with map coordinates as if from a space mission. 'A public school in the countryside borrowed the collection for a project on the solar system,' he grins. 'They said, 'These aren't astronomy at all. They look like they were taken with a Kodak seaside camera.'' In fact, they were taken with the same 1950s Hasselblad camera ('the Blad') that Mitchell has carried with him for over half a century. Every photo taken by the Blad, it seems, has a story. Take his striking shot of a biker gang in front of a motorcycle mural that adorned the side of a Leeds house. 'I just happened by,' he says. 'Two girls were leaning against an old Porsche, a bit of a wreck really. One guy was sitting on his bike and another bloke behind him was threatening somebody. I didn't want to interrupt, so I said, 'I'll just take a picture.'' Later, Porsche offered him £300 to publish the photo in their magazine. 'I said they could have it for nothing as long as they sent me a copy. They did and alongside my picture was a bigger one of the very same car, roaring around the tracks – as it once had been.' The Blad has also documented decades of social change, including the impact of multiculturalism on the city. A photograph of Caribbean sound system Sir Yank's Heavy Disco was taken during the annual carnival, in the days when DJs would pile loudspeakers in front gardens and run power cables out of every window looking out. 'The day before the carnival, we'd always get a letter,' grins Mitchell. 'It said, 'Do not give them any electricity – because it's dangerous.'' Sir Yank ('the boss of Yorkshire sounds') ran a nearby record shop selling Jamaican imports, so Mitchell photographed that as well. Another shot, called How Many Aunties?, captures the colourful chaos at an Asian wedding that took place in the backstreets near his house. 'I went to put the rubbish out,' says Mitchell, 'and saw cars draw up. A Sikh chap was trying to take a photo but couldn't get everyone in and all the women were drifting back inside. I ran up my steps, grabbed the camera from the kitchen, and told them, 'I'll take it!'' Occasionally, he shot interiors, such as Concorde Wallpaper, snapped on a bedroom wall. He glimpsed it through a window and politely asked to photograph it. 'It's a bad shot really, a bit blurred,' he says. 'But it became really popular. A few years ago, a nice illustrator gave me a big piece of that same wallpaper in exchange for a large copy of my photo. She'd seen it somewhere, gone inside and prised it off.' Throughout it all, he has remained in Chapeltown, in the same house. Last year it was burgled four times, but recently a silver Audi pulled up and a man got out and expressed an interest in buying the place. 'Then he went, 'Do you still live here? I used to jump off that wall when I was a kid.' He couldn't believe it had been the same person in the house all this time.' Meanwhile the city changes around him. Mitchell is dismayed whenever Victoriana is replaced by some big bit of boring plastic, but he still gets a childlike thrill from discovering a hidden gem, such as the century-old butcher's shop he came across recently with 'beautiful green tiling'. Although he doesn't walk the streets with the Blad as much as he used to, he still likes to get around and does 'little bits of photography' when he can. 'The Blad's almost too heavy for me to use now,' he says. 'But someone's knitted me a woollen replica. When I go to the exhibition, I'm going to carry that.' Nothing Lasts Forever is at the Photographers' Gallery, London, 7 March to 15 June. A book of the same title is published by RRB Photobooks.
BBC News
28-01-2025
- Entertainment
- BBC News
Matchbox and Airfix 'era ends' as Dunstable-born artist dies
An artist has saluted two painters who fired generations of youthful imaginations by creating art for Matchbox and Airfix model kit Postlethwaite tipped his wings in tribute following the death of 84-year-old Roy Huxley, who was born in Dunstable, Bedfordshire, and painted the aircraft images that adorned Matchbox model Cross, who created box art for Airfix and had a family link to Smallford, Hertfordshire, died in who is also an aviation artist, said Huxley's death marked the end of an era. Postlethwaite said Roy Huxley, who died on 18 January, first produced paintings for Matchbox in 1972 and was one of the "most recognised box-artists in the world".Cross, who was born in Camberwell, south London, and died in April aged 100, had a 75-year career and was similarly said Cross was a "legend of aviation art" and an "inspiration".Both had lived near each other in Tunbridge Wells in Kent."Roy Cross was Airfix, Roy Huxley was Matchbox," said Postlethwaite."Now Roy Huxley has died, it's the end of an era." Cross's son, Anthony Cross, agreed is was "indeed the end of an era"."My father was at times a little surprised he was mostly remembered for his box top art when his fine art, particularly the marine work, was the pinnacle of his artistic creativity," he said. "I guess this is because the Airfix years recreate many happy hours spent in childhood." A brief history of Airfix 1939 - Hungarian emigre Nicholas Kove starts Airfix in London1947 - Airfix becomes the largest producer of injection moulded combs in Britain1952 - First Airfix kit, the Golden Hind, Francis Drake's flagship, on sale in Woolworths, for two shillings (10p sterling after decimalistaion)1953 - All-time Airfix best-seller released - the "two-bob [two shilling]" Spitfire kit, which was a 1/72 scale replica 21-part bagged model in light blue plastic, with instructions1960-1970 - Range expands to include figures, trains, ships, cars and more. Sales run into millions1980 - Computer games introduced. Modelling goes into decline1981 - Airfix goes into receivership; bought by General Mills1985 - Sold to Hobby Products Group of Borden, who also owned Humbrol1995 - Hobby Products Group, including Airfix, sold to Humbrol2006 - Hornby Hobbies Ltd buy Airfix and Humbrol Roy Cross had been introduced to art by an aunt he spent childhood holidays with in Station Road, son Anthony said: "It's heartening to get so many kind messages of appreciation from people for whom my father's work clearly gave a great deal of pleasure."No doubt this can be said too of Roy Huxley."Both men were talented artists and knew how to stir the blood." Postlethwaite said Huxley, who also painted images of ships and armoured vehicles, was "renowned" for his detail and accuracy."Roy was very significant in the aviation art business and an inspiration to many, many artists," said Postlethwaite."Anyone who had Matchbox kits would recognises his paintings."The painting on the box was often the reason for buying the kit."The artist created the imagination about the plane with the painting." Follow Beds, Herts and Bucks news on BBC Sounds, Facebook, Instagram and X.
